As
silly as this sounds, I don’t think I ever learned how to feel my feelings in a
healthy manner. I am really REALLY good
at numbing out with food or avoiding my feelings by overscheduling my days, but
I don’t know if I ever understood why feeling all your feelings is so crucial
and powerful. Recently I read the book the
Conscious Parent and I was overwhelmed by what I learned. I not only learned a more mindful way to
parent but I gained a lot of insight into how my childhood created my patterns
of numbing and stuffing my emotions.
In the Conscious Parent, Dr. Shefali
Tsabary discusses that as children, we find strong negative emotions
overwhelming; so we try not to feel them.
Since no one ever teaches us a different way, as we grow up we refine
our pattern of avoidance by watching our parents:
When we are
raised by parents who value emotional control over emotional expression, we
learn early how to painstakingly monitor our emotional responses, weeding out those
that evoke disapproval. Because we
believe an outburst of emotional expression is a weakness, suppressing our
emotions becomes an automatic tactic….…. We [adults] find it difficult to
tolerate feelings such as rejection, fear, anxiety, ambivalence, doubt and
sadness. So we run from our feelings
either by burying them through avoidance, fighting them, or displacing them
onto people and situations outside ourselves through emotional reactivity.
In my home, I regularly heard, “stop
overreacting.” I grew up believing I was
overemotional and that something was wrong with me because I couldn’t control
all of my feelings. Reading the book
validated my feelings and let me know I wasn’t broken. I wanted to teach my son how to feel in a
healthy way….. but first I had to learn it for myself.
Although
there are many techniques to help us better align with our feelings, I
re-visited a Soul Sunday interview with Penache Desai. Penache identified that at our most basic
form, humans are energy; and emotions are simply “energy in motion.” It made sense that feelings are supposed to
move through you. I am not still
devastated about my break up with my college boyfriend or mad at my brother for
ripping the heads off my Barbie dolls. Those
emotions have left. Penache explained
that emotions are designed to come up, show/teach us something about ourselves/our
lives and then leave. But, since so many
of us were raised to be scared of our feelings, we stuff, avoid, numb, ignore,
etc. instead of allowing them to come up.
How do
we change this stuffing, suppressing, ignoring pattern? How do we start to feel? Although I will be discussing some additional
strategies in my future blogs, Penache believes fully feeling simply requires awareness
of breath and slowing our lives down.
My mom
recently had open heart surgery to replace 3 faulty valves. Her recovery has been slow and bumpy. One day I was taking care of her, doing
anything and everything she needed, and seemingly out of the blue she
criticized both my weight and my parenting.
These are my 2 most vulnerable soft spots. I felt like I had been punched in the gut and
my first impulse was to sling anger right back at her. But instead, I consciously walked into the
bedroom, shut the door and sat on the edge of the bed. I took a deep breath and focused on how the
anger felt in my body. I allowed the
hurt and deep sadness to come up. I
continued to sit with it without fighting the feeling (I don’t want to be
feeling this), judging the feeling (dammit why do I let her get to me) or
blaming my mother (how can she be so mean and hurtful.) I allowed the ball of heaviness in my throat
to just “be” focusing on my breath. I fought
the strong STRONG urge to get up and DO something….ANYTHING, but I forced
myself to sit with all of it. After a
few minutes my body relaxed and the feelings subsided. A calmness came over me and I knew I needed
to work on my insecurities about my weight and my parenting skills. I knew I needed to work on being okay being
ME. I calmly walked back into the living
room without any resonating, “I want to slap you” feelings.
Our
emotions hold so many of the answers that we are looking for. They are breadcrumbs leading us to our true
selves and our purpose. All we have to
do is feel…….
****
our next blog will discuss how to use the times we are triggered to uncover our
feelings.